Notes from The Ordeal of Change

_The Ordeal of Change_ by Eric Hoffer
NY: Harper & Row, 1952-1963 [1957 excepted]

“Drastic Change”
(1) Back in 1936 I spent a good part of the year picking peas. I started out early in January in the Imperial Valley and drifted northward, picking peas as they ripened, until I picked the last peas of the seaon, in June, around Tracy. Then I shifted all the way to Lake County, where for the first time I was going to pick string beans. And I still remember how hesitant I was that first morning as I was about to address myself to the string bean vines. Would I be able to pick string beans? Even the change from peas to string beans had in it elements of fear.

(1-2) We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs inordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.

(2) Where there is the necessary skill to move mountains there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.

(4) The substitute for self-confidence is faith; the substitute for self-esteem is pride; and the substitute for individual balance is fusion with others into a compact group.

(5) The revolutionary mood and temper are generated by the irritations, difficulties, hungers, and frustrations inherent in the realization of drastic change.

Where things have not changed at all, there is the least likelihood of revolution.

“The Awakening of Asia”
(12) Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the fruits of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of their inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.

“The Readiness to Work”
(32) To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium. And if, as Napolean wrote to Carnot, “the art of government is not to let men go stale,” then it is essentially an art of unbalancing.

(40) America is the only instance of a civilization shaped and colored by the tastes and values of common folk. No elite of whatever nature can feel truly at home in America. This is true not only of the aristocrat proper, but also of the intellectual, the military leader, the business tycoon, and even the labor leader.

“Jehovah and the Machine Age”
(75) It is perhaps not entirely so, though it has often been said, that man makes his God in his own image. Rather does he create Him in the image of his cravings and dreams - in the image of what man wants to be.

"Workingman and Management”
(80) The ruthlessness born of self-seeking is ineffectual compared with the ruthlessness sustained by dedication to a holy cause.

“Popular Upheavals in Communist Countries”
(84) De Tocqueville: “The evils which are endured with patience as long as they are inevitable, seem intolerable as soon as a hope can be entertained of escaping from them.” Despair and misery are static factors. The dynamism of an uprising flows from hope and pride. Not actual suffering but the hope of better things incites people to revolt.

… It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.

“Brotherhood”
(92) To promote solidarity among neighbors is as good a way as any to block the diffusion of totalitarianism in a society.

…Self-righteousness is a manifestation of self-contempt. When we are conscious of our worthlessness, we naturally expect others to be finer and better than we are. We demand more of them than we do of ourselves, and it is as if we wished to be disappointed in them. Rudeness luxuriates in the absence of self-respect.

“the Playful Mood”
(112) Lun Yü - Analects of Confucius

(114-115) The urgent search for the vitality necessary is likely to stop once we have found something that is more or less adequate, but the superfluous has no end. Hence the fact that man’s most unflagging and spectacular efforts were made not in search of necessities but of superfluities.

“The Unnaturalness of Human Nature”
(120) The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti humanity.

“The Role of the Undesirables”
(242) Resistance, whether to one’s appetites or to the ways of the world, is a chief factor in the shaping of character; and the average tramp is, more or less, a slave of his few appetites. He generally takes the easiest way out.